


The Path in Summer

by sheepishwolfy



Series: Beasts in Fields of Flowers [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Friends With Benefits, Geralt doesn't talk enough, Jaskier says too much, M/M, Pining, Sleep Paralysis, Vampires, and maybe a little more, geralt's wolf shaped brass knuckles, monster hunting, sexy knife throwing lesson, tags added as needed, they both have feelings but they're too dumb to talk about it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 15:53:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29316651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheepishwolfy/pseuds/sheepishwolfy
Summary: "Hunt with me," Geralt said, when spring had barely shown its face. Then, somehow, it was autumn. An entire summer whiled away at the heels of a witcher, and Jaskier hardly noticed. Maybe he should have paid better attention--in all the many years they've known each other, never had they spent so long together on the Path. Never had they talked so much and said so very little.Or, seven contracts, and seven chances to say something.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: Beasts in Fields of Flowers [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2001310
Comments: 8
Kudos: 63





	1. Prologue: The Seventh Hunt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> summer's ending, for better or worse.

An arm flew over Jaskier’s head—thankfully, if disgustingly, departed from its body. It landed with a wet thump and splattered his boots with swamp water, wriggling like a bony worm, its broken-nailed fingers clawed through the shallows. With a disgusted noise Jaskier kicked it away with his heel, slipping sideways against the damp, mossy rock at his back.

Somewhere on the other side of it, in the fog and gloom, Geralt cursed. Loudly, colorfully, underscored by the wet hacking particular to sword on bone. An unearthly shriek, rippling as if from the bottom of a lake, answered the witcher’s swearing. More scuffling, splashing, squelching, and something else—Jaskier had to assume another body part—slapped against the other side of his rock.

Jaskier leaned fractionally around the stone, saw that his assumption was correct. A second arm lay in the muck, writhing pitifully, not yet aware it had been detached. He wrinkled his nose in distaste, retreated back behind his cover.

Then looked again, first at the new arm, then the old, which had finally ceased its thrashing. They were both left arms, he realized, and different colors. 

Two hags, then. 

Well, that explained all the cussing.

“Alright over there?” Jaskier called. 

“No!” came the snarled reply. And then, “Fuck!”

Jaskier scrambled to his feet, a remarkably difficult task in two inches of bog. His boot heels skidded through the mud, and his fingers found no purchase on the slick rock. He loosed a curse of his own, an exasperated “ _ploughing fuck!_ ” when his knee found another stone beneath the mud. Pain ripped all the way up to his hip, the ringing sting of a touched nerve. Hobbling, hissing, Jaskier shook out his leg, and finally managed to stumble upright.

Leaning over the rock, he squinted into the surrounding mist. In the watery light oozing through the canopy, Jaskier thought he made out the silver flash of a sword, the hunched silhouette of a hag. 

“I can’t see you!” Jaskier yelled into the fog. 

A wordless grunt, a crack like thunder, and a sudden, stiff wind blew Jaskier’s hair back, splattering him with mud and swamp-water and Melitele knew what else. He swept his sleeve across his eyes, blinked, and found the mist was cleared by the witcher’s aard. 

Knee-deep in murky water, flanked by a pair of newly-one-armed bilge hags, Geralt whipped in a tight circle and caught one of the creatures across the chest with the tip of his sword. It howled and fell back, the wound smoking with silver burns, and dove beneath the bog’s surface. The other one shot forward, ungodly long tongue lashing at the air. Reflexes pushed beyond their limits by some manner of potion, Geralt spun and struck out with his opposite fist. Silver glinted on his knuckles, a row of pointed wolf’s-heads that tore deep gouges into the hag’s sunken cheek. 

Screaming through a ruined mouth, hideous tongue lolling down into the muck, the hag slashed at Geralt with its one good arm. The witcher easily slapped the claws away with the flat of his blade. The return arc buried deep between the hag’s neck and shoulder, all but cleaving it in two. It crumpled limply into the water as Geralt ripped the sword free from its corpse.

Pivoting in place, dilated eyes flicking across the surface, Geralt searched for the second hag. “Do you see it?”

Jaskier, pitiful though his human eyes may have been in comparison, desperately searched the swamp for any sign. “No! It dove, it—” 

A ripple across the mud at the witcher’s heels.

“ _Behind_!” Jaskier cried.

The hag exploded through the surface in a mist of filth. Geralt tucked his head, dodging just enough that the hag’s long claws scraped against his armored shoulder rather than his face. They caught in the seam between leather plates, ripping the witcher sideways but not off his feet. Blindly he struck backwards with his silver-knuckled fist, tried to pull away from the creature. It held him fast, and unhinged its jaw, and whipped its meaty tongue tight around his neck. 

Geralt’s sword splashed to the wet earth as he clawed at the choking tentacle. The hag leapt fully onto his back, tightening its grip, doing its best to topple him into the water.

The silver knife was already in Jaskier’s hand as he threw himself out from behind the rock. Two hopping steps forward, shoulders straight, Jaskier whipped his arm out. Exhaling on the release, just like Geralt taught him, though it was more a rageful snarl than a practiced breath. 

The blade sailed through the air, golden dandelions catching the meager light as it sunk home. Almost home—he’d aimed center mass, it pierced the hag’s emaciated thigh. Still, it screamed and loosened its hold on Geralt. Enough for the witcher to roll his shoulders forward, hurling the hag overhead and onto its back. He fell on it, striking once—twice— _three_ times in rapid succession. Bits of gore and hag-skull clung to the wolf’s-heads when Geralt stopped, fist poised to strike again if the thing so much as twitched.

But it was dead, well and truly, its face a pulped mess of yellow teeth and exposed bone. 

The witcher straightened, chest heaving with ragged breath, nostrils flaring like a beast’s as he stood over the downed hags. He looked up, and even at the distance Jaskier could see his pupils blown so wide they left no trace of golden iris. Traceries of black crept up the sides of his neck, down across his temples, stark against skin gone so pale it was nearly transparent.

Terrifying and utterly inhuman, until he shook himself like a dog and said, “Fuck bogs. And hags. Double fuck bog hags.”

“How very eloquent,” Jaskier snorted. He delicately picked his way across the swamp, as if he wasn’t already head-to-toe grime and filth. These boots were a complete loss, as well the socks, and probably the doublet, too. Another outfit sacrificed at the altar of befriending a witcher.

“Your aim's getting pretty good,” Geralt said, reaching down to tug the knife from the dead hag. He offered it hilt-first to Jaskier. “At least you didn’t hit me this time.”

“That was _once_.” Jaskier took the knife, flicked the worst of the muck from its blade, and then wiped it on his sleeve. There was nothing to be done, yet, about the blood and slime caked in the grip’s inlays. “And it was the hilt, anyway, not the business end.”

Geralt laughed, low and gravely. His voice had that harsh edge to it, peculiar to low-grade blood toxicity. “It’s all business end, if you throw it hard enough.”

His smile had a little too much tooth to it, and it clearly took an effort to keep his breath steady. Still in the grip of whatever he’d taken to face the pair of hags.

Jaskier reached out, hesitated, fingers stopping just shy of Geralt’s arm. It was a toss-up whether he welcomed touch or shied away, like this. “Do you need—?”

The witcher waved him off. “White honey’s on the horse. It’ll wear off by the time we get back to the road.”

“If you’re certain.”

Geralt snorted, a sound more beastly than he intended. “Been at this a while, mother hen.” Turning away, he trudged off to find his sword.

Jaskier rolled his eyes at the witcher’s back. So what if he fussed? Barely a year ago the man had done his level best to die in a hog field, _someone_ had to have a modicum of care for his well-being. And if that someone was Jaskier, so be it. 

Swords and hag arms retrieved, they made the slog back to the road and the horses. Sucking mud slowly gave way to firm, mossy grass; the thick, drooping canopy shifted over to the airy greens of ash and elm. Bright blue sky peeked through the leaves, mid-afternoon sun warming through their swamp-damp clothing. 

Roach and Thistle were right where they’d been left, tethered just inside the treeline near the road. Geralt, as always, paused to let his horse nose at the front of him, to pat her broad neck and kiss her wide brow and generally fawn over her. Jaskier’s mount, by contrast, flared her nostrils at the bard, rattling her tack.

“Oh, I know, love, I don’t care for the smell of me right now either,” Jaskier said, stroking a hand over her dappled shoulder. She hardly acknowledged the touch. Unless Jaskier had a pocket full of sugar cubes Thistle was aloof at best, and he loved her for it. Theirs was a working relationship, and it had taken a respectable amount of effort to reach even that accord. 

Jaskier set to untying the reins for both mounts, with an eye on Geralt fastening the dripping sack of hag trophies to Roach’s saddle. 

“Another successful contract on the pile. What is this, now, seven?” Jaskier asked. 

Geralt hummed and nodded, bending to check the girth-strap.

“A veritable bumper crop of monsters.” Jaskier looped the reins over Thistle’s head, and looked up into the bright sky. “And still with some summer left!”

Tugging his gloves off, Geralt turned a curious gaze on Jaskier. He squinted against the late afternoon light, harsh against his still-dilated eyes. “It’s autumn.”

“That can’t be right,” Jaskier said, frowning. 

Geralt pointed over Jaskier’s shoulder. “Near enough.”

Turning to follow the gesture, Jaskier saw the trees weren’t so verdant as he’d thought. Red and yellow lurked among the green. Sure enough, autumn was coming, the summer having slipped away like samaras on the wind. 

“Feels like we just left Ard Carraigh,” Jaskier said, hooking a foot in the stirrup. He swung up into the saddle, and realized as soon as he settled that his trousers were still...moist. He must’ve made an audible noise of disgust, because Geralt laughed.

It almost sounded human again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow wow wow this is finally getting off the ground. follow me [on twitter](https://twitter.com/sheepishwolfy), to hear about bread i'm baking and football i'm watching and sometimes hollering about these two idiots.
> 
> as ever big huge mega thank you & coin toss to [Gen](https://twitter.com/hrtbrokentweets), from whom i borrowed the brain cell to get this done.


	2. Throwing Knives at Harpies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> geralt gave jaskier a knife. that may have been a mistake.

**The First Hunt**

Spring though it was, snow still clung to the nearby mountains. The breeze through the open window had the faintest bite of frost to it, cutting down the open collar of Jaskier’s doublet. Hard to notice the chill, though, with the witcher standing so close. 

“So, what’s this contract you picked up so quickly?” Jaskier asked. He rested his elbow across Geralt’s shoulder. Easier than holding his arm up in the air for who knew how much longer.

“Harpies roosting in the south wood. Should be easy,” Geralt replied, absent. His focus was entirely on fastening Jaskier’s knife into the frog on his belt. The leather was brand new and stiff, creaking as Geralt tugged the laces. He could’ve given over one of his own, well-worn and broken in, but this silver dagger was far more slender and elegant than a witcher’s weapons. 

Jaskier set his chin on his fist, confident Geralt could withstand being leaned on further. He glanced down at Geralt’s deft hands, working diligently. “I think, perhaps, this would’ve been a simpler task if you’d thought to do it before I put the belt on.”

Geralt hesitated for just a moment, eyes darting to the nearby bed, the rumpled sheets, the fine red outfit still in a heap on the floor. “I was distracted,” he murmured.

The bard smiled smugly, and said nothing further.

Soon enough Geralt finished his task, giving the frog a sharp tug to be sure. He backed up a step, hands on his hips, and nodded to the knife. “Placement feel right?”

Blinking, Jaskier looked down at the dagger secured to his belt, then back at the expectant witcher. “I’m going to be honest with you, I haven’t the foggiest what qualifies as the ‘right placement’.”

“Try drawing it,” Geralt said, miming the action.

It was a clumsy motion, Jaskier reaching across to yank the blade from its scabbard. It took a try and a half, but he didn’t drop it, or cut himself, and he considered that a success. Geralt seemed less than impressed, cocking his head and pressing his lips into a thin line.

“We’ll work on that,” he said, with a smile that stopped just shy of reassuring. 

“I suppose you were flawless the first time you handled a blade,” Jaskier said, good-natured, as he stuck the knife back in its place. 

“Not at all.” Geralt set to donning his own gear, all quick practiced motions. Strapping both swords to his back, the witcher paused, recalling. “Of course, Vesemir knew better than to give a novice live steel.”

“Ah, so if I slice my own fingers off, it’s _your_ fault,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt shook his head, a wry smile parting his lips. “Let’s just try to keep all your fingers where they’re supposed to be.”

With a narrow look, Jaskier grinned and said, “Aren’t we meant to be leaving? But I could absolutely put them all back in—”

“Alright, demon, we’ve wasted enough daylight,” Geralt said, with poorly feigned exasperation. Catching him by the shoulder, Geralt spun Jaskier around and frog-marched him towards the door. 

Early-blooming dandelions flanked the south road, a sea of sunny yellow broken here and there by the rosy pink of honeysuckle, the dusty violet of hyacinths. Even after so many visits, Jaskier found the meadows outside Ard Carraigh to be a pleasant surprise. A lovely riot of color separating the high, grey walls of the city from the gloomy peaks of the pine forest beyond. More than one spring afternoon had been spent lazing in these fields, and he had half a mind to urge Geralt off the road and into the wildflowers right that very moment.

But they had a job to do— _Geralt_ had a job to do. Jaskier was there for… moral support, he supposed. Bait, maybe. Did harpies have a taste for stringy bard-flesh? Hopefully he wouldn’t find out.

“I imagine you’ve some sort of plan,” Jaskier said, leaning away from a bee that got too curious. His horse huffed at the shift in weight.

“Find the nest, kill one of them,” Geralt said. He sat straight as an arrow in the saddle, resolutely facing forward. All business, on the Path.

“Just the one?” Jaskier asked. 

“How it goes with harpies. Kill the queen, burn a nest, the others will take off. Usually, that flock won’t come back,” Geralt explained. “ _Usually_. How are you with a crossbow?”

Jaskier rolled his head aside, leveling a flat look at his companion. “We both know the answer to that question, wolf.” 

“Sometimes you surprise me,” Geralt said, with a lazy shrug.

They broke the treeline, the shade of the pines dropping the temperature considerably. Snow still clung to the bases of a few trees, stubborn and slushy. A narrow hunters’ path broke off from the main road, half-hidden by scrubby, wilted grass. 

“This way.” Geralt steered Roach off the road. “Close to the foot of the mountains. Hunters found the nest the hard way.”

Jaskier grimaced. “How hard?” 

“One got picked up and dropped from about forty feet in the air,” Geralt said. 

The bard heeled his horse to a stop. “ _Forty feet?_ ” he echoed, choked. “They can… they’re strong enough to lift a man that high?”

“If you’re very unlucky,” Geralt said. He glanced back over his shoulder, but didn’t slow Roach. “And he’s fine, he just broke both legs and collarbones.”

“Oh, is that all,” Jaskier murmured. 

After what seemed to Jaskier an arbitrary distance into the woods, they left the horses tethered to low tree branches and continued on foot. Geralt moved deliberately through the underbrush, listening so intently to the ambient forest noise that Jaskier fancied he could see the witcher’s ears flicking like a horse’s. Jaskier did his best to follow exactly in Geralt’s footsteps, as much so he didn’t fall on his face as to keep quiet. 

He was so focused on not tripping that he almost didn’t notice Geralt halt in his tracks. Jaskier sputtered as he nearly collided with the witcher’s back. Half-turning, Geralt pressed a finger to his lips, then pointed ahead. Leaning around Geralt’s broader form, Jaskier squinted through the trees. Maybe a dozen paces up, the sun seemed brighter. A clearing of some kind, and beyond it, the base of the mountain. 

_Stay_ , mouthed Geralt, patting the air with one hand, and Jasker almost thought to protest being commanded like a dog. Then he recalled the hunter with shattered legs and clavicles, and wisely kept his mouth shut.

Lowering to a crouch, Geralt crept to the edge of the clearing. He hunkered there for a long moment, surveying the space beyond. A shadow far too large to be a bird briefly darkened the sky over his head, and he tracked its passing with keen eyes. Jaskier, out of an abundance of caution, glanced up at the canopy.

He almost missed Geralt beckoning him forward. 

They roosted against the sheer cliff face, crude stick-and-mud structures that looked like giant weaver bird nests. The nearest were just a few feet off the ground, the highest at least a hundred feet up. Maybe fifteen harpies perched in the nests, or circled lazily high above. 

Harpies, so it went, were not giant birds with the torsos of shapely young women like the stories claimed. Crouched next to Geralt and staring at a whole flock of them, Jaskier could see where the idea may have come from. The only parts of them that weren’t feathered were their roughly humanoid chests and shoulders—a few even had what could generously be considered breasts. Their faces were bare as well, but Jaskier would hardly call them _human_. Huge, perfectly circular yellow eyes over protruding mouths like fleshy beaks full of sharp teeth. 

As they watched, two of the harpies squabbled in one of the nests. Shrill cries split the air as they beat at each other with their massive wings, took swipes with unnervingly long arms. Their hands and feet both were tipped with wicked, curved claws.

“Pretty sure that one’s the queen,” Geralt murmured, leaning towards Jaskier. He pointed to a nest a quarter of the way up the cliff.

“How can you tell?” asked Jaskier, shading his eyes against the noonday sun. All the harpies seemed indistinguishable to him, and this one was no different. The same oily green-black feathers, same yellow eyes, same twitchy, birdlike flicks of her head. 

“Biggest nest for the biggest bird,” Geralt said. He reached behind himself, freeing his small crossbow. Hardly looking, he drew a bolt from the little quiver at his hip and loaded it. “And none of the others are fucking with her.”

“You’re about to, though, hey?” Jaskier said. 

Geralt hummed a gruff little assent, and sighted down the crossbow. “This should clear them,” he said, closing one eye and adjusting his aim. “But if it doesn’t, just stay low.”

A quiet _twang_ as Geralt fired. The bolt flew fast and true, and would’ve hit the harpy right in her feathered heart if she hadn’t chosen that moment to bend down and preen at her wing. The silvered tip of the bolt struck the rock face at her back, clattering uselessly into the nest.

“That’s unfortunate,” Jaskier said softly. 

The queen, startled, launched from her perch with a piercing shriek. Geralt swore loudly and slammed another bolt into the crossbow. Alerted by their queen, the other harpies picked up the chattering cry and took wing. 

“ _Shit_ ,” Geralt hissed, wrenching the string back on the crossbow. He repeated it while he darted forward into the field, a stream of “shit, shit, _shit,_ fuck, shit,” as he aimed into the sun and tried to track the queen across the sky. The second arrow missed by an even larger margin than the first.

He wasn’t going to get a third shot.

The crossbow fell to the earth where he stood. He could retrieve it later, provided he didn’t get his head ripped off by a dozen angry harpies. As the first of the flock dove, Geralt drew his silver sword and braced.

They circled and screamed, a squawking cyclone of feathers and curved talons that tore at Geralt’s armor. He ducked and struck out with his sword, cutting through the harpies with woeful inefficiency. A blast of aard sent two into the cliff face, to collapse in twitching heaps when they fell to the ground. Another he caught by the scaled ankle and, using the creature’s own momentum, swung it face-first into the earth. 

Jaskier, hands pressed to either side of his face, watched from the underbrush. The harpies moved with the coordination of a school of fish, completely obscuring Geralt but for the white streak of his hair, the bright flash of his sword through ink-black feathers. Splashes of red threw out of the mass, blood that could be Geralt’s or the flock’s.

He needed to help, somehow. Geralt had said _hunt with me_ , not _watch me get turned into a pile of meat_. Geralt had also asked if Jaskier could use a crossbow—and he couldn’t, but neither could he use a sword, and that hadn’t stopped him. Maybe if he could get to the weapon Geralt had dropped...

As Jaskier waffled, the sea of harpies parted, revealing for a terrible moment Geralt alone in the grass. He bled from a dozen shallow cuts to his neck and face, one spaulder torn and dangling from his shoulder. As if from thin air, the queen burst from the flock and hurtled at Geralt’s back.

She slammed hard into the witcher, toppling him face-first into the grass. He struck the ground with a bitten-off curse, his sword knocked from his grasp. _Put a chain on that thing_ , Jaskier thought, distant and desperate. Long talons dug into Geralt’s shoulders, catching in studded leather, biting into flesh on the unprotected side. She clutched at his hair, spindly fingers tangling in long hanks of it.

Jaskier watched in horror as the harpy queen beat her massive wings and began to lift the witcher into the sky. He had nothing, no bolts, no convenient bag of bombs—by the time he ran to Roach and back, assuming she had anything useful in her bags, the White Wolf would be the Red Smear. Not even witchers were shatterproof, if dropped from a great enough height.

“Jaskier!” Geralt snarled, his toes just barely dragging along the earth. Cursing and flailing and terribly heavy, he was proving difficult for the harpy to lift much more than a few inches. “Throw me your knife!”

In all their years together, Jaskier had seen Geralt throw a great many things. Axes, bombs, rocks, four foot long silver swords, smaller monsters. Surely it couldn’t be that difficult. Or so he told himself, as he scuttled into the field like a large (and handsome) spider. Skidding to a halt, Jaskier flipped the knife in his hand to hold it by the blade—this was, if he recalled correctly, the way Geralt did it. Winding it overhand, the razor edge of the blade slit his fingers as it spun end-over-end through the air.

“What the _fuck_!” hollered the witcher, as a gold-inlaid hilt slammed into his temple. It was, Jaskier would later note, really quite remarkable how even dangling several feet off the ground with a harpy on his back, Geralt could manage to look so _disappointed_. 

The harpy shrieked as her prey jerked suddenly sideways, her grip slipping just enough that Geralt fell to the ground. He landed with a heavy exhalation, a great, thundering _wuff_ of a noise. In an instant the harpy was on him again, screaming and slashing and flapping.

“Oh, fuck off!” Jaskier spat, already running full-tilt across the grass. Shoulder-first he collided with the queen, tackling her sideways. Teeth and talons and feathers writhed beneath and then above him as they rolled, his head bouncing hard off the ground. Yellow eyes and yellower teeth flashed very close to his face. He winced away from an ear-splitting howl so loud it left his ears ringing, and then.. nothing. 

Jaskier died. 

Horribly. 

His beautiful face eaten off by a harpy in a field at the base of the Blue Mountains. Already his soul was leaving his body, lifted from this mortal coil with the gentle voice of Melitele calling him home…

“Fuck, Jaskier!”

Melitele sounded an awful lot like Geralt. 

Peeking his eyes open, Jaskier found the witcher’s scratched-up face hovering over him, contorted with worry. He gripped the front of Jaskier’s jacket with both hands, half lifting him from the ground. Behind him, the remaining harpies retreated up the mountain. 

“Oh.” Jaskier blinked, and took an experimental breath, which he then let out in a resigned sigh. “I’m not dead, then? Shame, that would’ve been quite a heroic way to go.”

Geralt dropped him.

“Oof,” said Jaskier. He remained spread-eagle in the grass, winded, cataloguing which parts of his body were still attached. All of them, thankfully, though there was a high tinnitus whine in his left ear, and his fingers stung terribly. He lifted the injured hand to squint at the damage. Blood dripped in his eye. He lowered the hand again. The fingers all bent the way they should, he didn’t need to look at it.

Sitting up, he looked over in time to see the dead harpy jerk once as Geralt pulled the dandelion knife from her lifeless chest. The witcher did not stand immediately, instead laying one hand on the harpy’s still shoulder.

“Sorry I had to take half your flock with you,” he murmured, so softly Jaskier almost didn’t catch it.

Standing, he shook his fallen hair out of his face. A bruise was beginning to welt up next to his eye, vaguely hilt-shaped. He walked sternly back towards Jaskier, the intimidation rather mitigated by his damaged armor flopping about uselessly. 

“I,” he said, crouching and touching the bloody knife to Jaskier’s chest, “am going to teach you to throw this fucking thing. Properly. Before you kill me.”

“Don’t get all terse with me, Geralt, you asked—nay, _demanded_!—that I do so,” Jaskier sniffed. He knocked the blade aside, and held out his bloody hand. “At great cost to myself I have, once again, saved your life with no thanks.”

Sitting back on his haunches, Geralt took Jaskier’s cut fingers in hand. He cocked his head, lips drawing into a tight line. “Jaskier,” he said, very softly. “You need your fingers.”

“Not as much as I need you alive,” Jaskier said, shrugging. “Wolf, if every paper cut could end my career, I’d never have made it out of Oxenfurt. Besides, I’m ambidextrous.”

Geralt snorted. “Of course you are.” Still, he briefly laid his other hand over Jaskier’s, cradling the damaged fingers. “Don’t be so reckless. Not for me.”

Jaskier chewed his lip, torn between responses pithy or sincere. Wound up saying nothing, when Geralt released his hand and went back to the harpy. 

Nothing, until Geralt drew a much larger knife and began collecting his proof of kill. Then Jaskier cursed and dry-heaved, the soggy ripping of flesh from bone proving the final straw for his delicate constitution. 

“Witchering,” Jaskier said, swallowing against the pre-puke rush of saliva, “is disgusting.”

Three days down the road, Geralt followed through on his promise-slash-threat. An abandoned barn sagged into view, complete with falling-down fence and fields gone to wild grasses. Spindly, new-growth elms sprouted within a ring of scorched stone. The foundation of a house, before tragedy had fallen. 

“This’ll do,” Geralt said, mostly to himself, and steered Roach towards the ruin. 

“This’ll do for _what?_ ” Jaskier asked. He reined his own mount to a stop, but did not follow Roach into the long grass. “It’s barely noon, if you wanted to sleep indoors we could’ve stayed another night at that very lovely inn back in… whatever that town was called.”

“Deavon-on-Liksela,” Geralt called over his shoulder. “And we aren’t sleeping here. Yet.”

“Oh-ho?” Jaskier said, perking in the saddle. “Feeling a bit virile are we? I don’t know that a crumbling barn would be my first choice for—“

“Knife throwing,” Geralt interjected, before the bard could get too far ahead of himself. He swung easily out of the saddle. 

“Right, of course, knife throwing,” Jaskier said, only mildly deflated. 

As Jaskier finally urged his horse off the road, Geralt shed his hastily-patched armor. He laid it neatly across the low stone wall, and went to dig through Roach’s saddlebags. Finding what he needed, he tucked it under his arm.

“Let me see your hand,” Geralt said, holding out his own as he approached. Dutifully, Jaskier laid his hand palm-up in Geralt’s. The witcher hummed over it, apparently satisfied. He’d smeared something on the wound when they’d returned to Ard Carraigh, and now it was well healed. New pink skin in an arrow-straight line across all four fingers.

“First lesson,” Geralt said, tweaking one of Jaskier’s now-healed fingers, “Don’t hold it by the blade. You’re going to cut all your tendons.”

“That’s how you do it,” Jaskier said, snatching his hand back. 

“I know what I’m doing,” Geralt replied simply. From beneath his arm he produced two short knives in blunt, unremarkable sheaths. “We’ll start with these.”

Taking them as though they might explode, Jaskier held one in each hand. Trailing behind Geralt as he walked towards the barn, Jaskier asked, “Shouldn’t I use my own? If that’s what I’m going to be carrying around all the time anyway?”

“Second lesson: unless you’re fighting something magical, silver’s a shit metal for a weapon,” Geralt said. He began to draw a target on the barn wall with a stubby piece of chalk he’d found at the bottom of the bag. “It’s soft, it doesn’t hold an edge, and if you hit the wrong thing with it, it’ll bend. Or shatter, if you’re unlucky.” Turning back to Jaskier, Geralt rapped his knuckles on the center ring of the target. “The side of a barn qualifies as _the wrong thing_.”

“Five paces back,” Geralt said, herding Jaskier away. “Easy starting distance. Which arm first?”

“Er, right, I suppose,” Jaskier replied, backing up the requested distance. 

“Pass me one of those, and watch closely,” Geralt said. 

Jaskier handed one of the knives to Geralt, who proceeded to strike out with such speed that Jaskier wasn’t sure he’d moved at all.

“See what I did?” Geralt asked, completely earnest.

Jaskier glanced at the knife now buried hilt-deep in the barn, then back at the expectant witcher. “No. Because I have human eyes.”

Geralt laughed, a quick flash of sharp teeth. “Sorry. Hand me the other one, I’ll go slower.”

The second throw could not, even generously, be called “slow”, as Geralt keyed his reflexes down from _witcher_ to merely _inhuman_. This was just enough of a difference that Jaskier could at least catch the full arc of Geralt’s arm, the shift of weight through his hips and back leg. The blade sang through the air, a bright blur sinking into the wood a hair’s breadth from the first.

“Go get them, and you try,” Geralt said, gesturing to the barn. 

“ _I_ go get them? You threw them,” Jaskier replied, hands on his hips. 

Geralt shrugged. “It’s _your_ training. Part of it is learning to handle the gear. Get the knives.” 

Muttering the whole way, Jaskier crossed the short distance to the barn and retrieved the weapons. Which took some doing; he had to brace a foot against the wood and yank each knife out with both hands. Five minutes into the lesson, and he was experiencing a deep and intense regret between his already-strained shoulder blades.

“Show me how you hold it,” Geralt said, when Jaskier had returned to his side. 

Gripping the handle tight in one fist, Jaskier held the dagger out. “Like this.”

“Hm.” Geralt shook his head minutely, and manually adjusted Jaskier’s hold. “Relax your grip. Hold it with your fingers, and put your thumb—here. No need to white knuckle it,” he said, shifting Jaskier’s thumb to lay along the edge of the hilt. “See how that feels a little more natural?”

“It does, yeah,” he agreed. Jaskier was so keenly focused on the witcher’s instruction, he hardly had time to appreciate the gently calloused fingers on his own. 

“Now face the target,” Geralt said, circling behind the bard. Jaskier turned only his head, to which Geralt chuckled and added, “With your whole body.”

He proved to be a very hands-on instructor. Geralt would give an instruction—square your shoulders, weight on your right foot, elbows in—and then correct Jaskier’s form with steady, well-practiced hands. 

“Didn’t realize so much of fighting was simply standing correctly,” Jaskier said, as Geralt nudged his feet a hair’s breadth further apart.

“Poor form will hurt you more than your opponent,” Geralt said idly. “Hard to defend yourself if you dislocate your shoulder on a shoddy throw.”

“By the time I get my feet in the right place, I’ll be dead already.” 

The witcher very quickly took to ignoring Jaskier’s stream of gripes. Once he was satisfied with the bard’s posture and stance, he backed up a step, and matched Jaskier’s pose. “Hold your arm out straight, sight down the blade to the target,” he said, miming the motion with his own. “Don’t tighten your hold at all, you won’t drop it—there.”

Breaking his stance again, Geralt turned back to Jaskier. “You want a straight line from here—” he tapped the bard’s shoulder, then drew his finger the length of his arm—“to the point of the knife, to the target. Don’t tip your head, move your whole body to adjust.”

Jaskier shuffled a bit to the right—then a bit back to the left. 

“Take your time,” Geralt said gently. “Keep your forward toe pointed at the target. Have your line?”

“I—yes?”

“Are you asking me?”

“No. I mean, yes—well. Um,” Jaskier stammered. Nerve-sweat was pricking up the back of his neck, a distant echo of his years of schooling. Geralt, at least, was much more attractive than the wizened sisters of the Temple school—and kinder. Nor did he have a cane to pop Jaskier’s knuckles for disobedience. With a measure of confidence, he said, “No, I’m not asking, but yes, I have the line.”

“Good.” Settling easy back into position, Geralt held his arm out again. “Bend your arm back, but keep it straight.”

Jaskier dropped his arm, thoroughly ruining his form to look incredulously at his instructor. “ _What_? Human arms don’t work like that.”

“Fix your posture,” Geralt said, jerking his chin at Jaskier’s slumped shoulders. “Do you want to learn, or not?”

“Learn to break my own arm, apparently,” Jaskier said, but schooled himself carefully back into stance. “How does one bend their arm while keeping it straight, O learnéd tutor?”

Geralt glanced briefly at the sky, but let it slip. He knew going in this would be challenging at best. “Bring your hand back level with your ear, but keep your elbow aimed at what you want to hit,” he explained, patting his own bent elbow for emphasis. 

Jaskier had never thought so intensely about his arms in his life, nor heard the word so many times in quick succession. He did as bid. Or so he thought, until Geralt pressed two fingers to Jaskier’s elbow and lowered it a fraction of an inch.

“Don’t bend it so far you angle your upper arm,” Geralt said. “And keep your elbows in. If you flap them around like a duck you’re going to miss, on top of looking like a fool.”

“I’m positive I already look like a fool,” Jaskier said, flat.

“Mildly.” Geralt dropped his hand from Jaskier’s elbow to his hip, the other settling at the small of his back. “Most of your power is going to come from this back leg. Bring your arm forward like you’re going to throw, but don’t let go yet.”

Swinging his arm forward again—slowly, so he didn’t chop his own ear off—Jaskier halted the motion when the knife was again parallel with the ground.

“Good, but make sure to use your whole body. Push off the back foot, through the hips and the shoulder. Try again,” Geralt said. This time, when Jaskier mimed the throw, Geralt guided the twist of Jaskier’s hip and spine. 

Several more times, Jaskier went through the motions of aiming and throwing. Geralt murmured corrections, a steady and mildly distracting presence at the bard’s back. 

“You’re going to release,” Geralt said, and Jaskier had to bite his tongue on a clever remark, “when your arm is straightened out again. But don’t stop the motion once you’ve let go, or you’ll stunt it. Follow through.”

“Are you actually going to let me throw it, or is it all theory and technique?” Jaskier asked. His arm was beginning to complain, so he lowered it and half-turned back towards the witcher. “You could lecture in the Philosophy halls at Oxenfurt, all they do is talk without action.”

Geralt’s laugh was just a huff of breath, ghosting across the back of Jaskier’s neck. He stepped away again, crossing his arms, the picture of aloof instruction. “I think you’re ready to try. Arm up.”

Jaskier returned to form, sighting down the line of his arm at the chalk target, the two divots already left in it. Exhaling slowly, suddenly nervous again, he drew back. He found himself acutely aware of every hinge in the complex apparatus that was his body, which felt now like it was made of spare parts.

“Don’t rush it,” Geralt murmured. 

Jaskier very promptly forgot everything Geralt had told him, and threw with the grace of a newborn foal. After a lazy half-turn through the spring air, the blade fell a pace short of the wall and slid to the earth like a weary man into bed. 

“No need to be so timid,” Geralt said. Tapping the mostly-faded bruise next to his eye, he said, “There’s more power in you than that.”

Shifting the second knife from his left to right hands, Jaskier reset his posture, aimed again. The anxiety of the first throw bled away beneath an old and until now well-buried desire: to be very good very quickly at anything he put his hand to. At university he’d learned the viol in a week—he could throw a knife in an hour.

The lust for perfection was a heady motivator. The second throw struck the wall with a resounding bang that startled a handful of birds through the hole in the barn roof. It was a foot to the left from the target, and sideways so it bounced into the grass, but...

“Better,” Geralt said, echoing Jaskier’s thoughts. “Good follow-through on the throw. But try not to flick your wrist. I know your instinct is to flourish, try to resist it or they’ll keep going wide. Pick them up and try again.”

It became a cycle. An agonizing, increasingly irritating cycle. Jaskier made two throws, they clattered sideways or hilt-on against the wood, then he retrieved the fallen daggers and threw again. Jaskier’s shoulder ached with the repeat, unfamiliar motion. Sweat sheened his forehead and the back of his neck. After what felt like the one hundredth unsuccessful throw (but was, in fact, only the twelfth), he stripped off his doublet and tossed it carelessly aside. Scowling fiercely, Jaskier set his foot back, aimed the knife.

“Don’t get frustrated. You'll get it,” Geralt said, a deep and unabating well of patience in the growing heat. 

Jaskier didn’t have much faith in that. He threw, he missed, he swore. Then a fourteenth time, he threw, he missed, he swore even more colorfully. Melitele’s cursēd tits were mentioned. 

“You’re holding your breath. Exhale through the throw,” Geralt suggested.

“Not sure what sort of difference that’s going to make,” Jaskier said miserably. But, he thought, it couldn’t possibly make him _worse_.

He exhaled.

He threw.

...It stuck.

For a long moment Jaskier stood with his arm still extended, staring at the knife wobbling half-sunk into the wood—an inch _inside_ the outer target ring. Then he thrust both fists into the air, crowing, “Fuck you, barn!”

Geralt grinned, clapping an enormous hand between Jaskier’s shoulder blades. “Good job,” he said, and Jaskier felt briefly like exploding into a confetti of pride. Then Geralt tempered it with, “Now do it again.”

“Again? Obviously I can do it, can’t we have lunch now?” Jaskier asked, borderline whining.

It was at this moment that Vesemir’s voice exited Geralt’s body: “Once is a fluke, twice is technique, a hundred times is prowess.”

“A _hundred times_? We’ll be here all day!”

“Your accuracy’s still shit. Get it dead center, we’ll eat,” Geralt said. Then turned away, so Jaskier couldn’t see him shudder and blanche at how very like his mentor he’d sounded. Half of him felt ancient, and the other felt like a child.

Jaskier, bereft, asked, “Where are _you_ going?”

“You’ll be fine on your own,” Geralt said, as he walked towards the horses. 

Readying his second blade, Jaskier grumbled, “I agreed because I thought this would be less work and more sexy.”

“Hard work is sexy,” Geralt laughed, voice carrying on the spring breeze.

“Only you think that!!”

To the tune of knives against old wood harmonized with Jaskier’s increasingly creative cursing, Geralt freed both horses of bridle, saddle, and bags. He turned them loose in the long-fallow field, to graze freely on dandelions and red fescue. His he trusted to stick close, and Jaskier’s antsy little grey followed the larger Roach like a duckling. Poor thing, it seemed, had never quite gotten over the shock of meeting a cockatrice. (“ _The shockatrice of it all_ ,” Jaskier had said, when his horse’d danced sideways away from a fallen log.)

The sun crept across the sky, and Jaskier’s throws crept nearer to the center of the target. More than half actually stuck in the wood. Perched on the remains of the stone foundation, Geralt mended his armor in the dappled shade of the elms and occasionally called out corrections. _Don’t tilt your head. Back straight. Don’t aim that thing at me unless you plan to kill me in one hit. Tuck your fucking elbows._

Jaskier sweated and cussed and his hand ached and there was a bug in his shoe and finally, finally struck dead fucking center. Three times in a row he hit, but didn’t stick, and Geralt didn’t even look up when he said, “Slow down. It’ll sink if you stop rushing.”

Sighing, already resigned to knowing Geralt was right, Jaskier took an extra moment to aim. Sure enough, the blade bit deep into the wood. “Finally,” he sighed, sagging all the way out of form, dropping his chin to his chest. He was so weary he couldn’t even bother to be proud. “I’m starving to death,” he continued, slouching towards the shade. The back of his neck was almost certainly sunburned. “I’m growing faint, Geralt. My arm is going to fall off. I’m—”

“Forgetting something,” Geralt said, glancing up from his mostly-patched pauldron. 

Jaskier pivoted in place. “Ah! My jacket. It’ll stain.”

“Your knives,” Geralt said sternly.

“They’ll be fine where they are for a minute,” Jaskier said, plucking up his discarded doublet. He gave it a loose shake, dislodging pollen and a few enterprising beetles.

“Go get them.” Again Geralt was possessed by Vesemir: “A weapon will only treat you as well as you treat it.”

Based on the drawn-out groan, Jaskier was then possessed by 13 year old Geralt as he sullenly trudged off. With exaggerated care, he retrieved the knives and set them primly on the stones next to Geralt. Geralt chucked an only slightly stale roll at his face. It bounced off Jaskier’s sweaty forehead, and rolled off into the grass, and Jaskier ate it anyway. 

To the surprise of no one, not even the distant horses, Jaskier’s mood improved as he ate. Two rolls, an apple and a handful of cashews later, he perked right up.

“You’re quite good at this,” Jaskier said, gesturing loosely with a second, vaguely mealy apple. He sat on the ground at Geralt’s knee, back to the stone and legs extended out before him.

Geralt frowned at the roughly patched leather resting across his thighs. The stitching was practiced and even, but could at best be considered _rustic_. “Would've prefered a smith.”

“No, not that—well, you’re fine at that, it looks rugged. The hardscrabble hero is a very popular cliche, you know.” Jaskier ran a finger down the studded edge of Geralt’s armor, and said, “I meant teaching. You’re very patient. I think you’d be quite successful if you decided to stop hunting to go train... well, what does one call a baby witcher, anyway? A witchling?”

Geralt’s hand stilled on needle and floss. His brows flickered downward, eyes settling on a patch of grass somewhere near Jaskier’s outstretched boot. “There... are no new witchers to train,” he said, very carefully. Like peeling a bandage away from an exposed bone. 

“Oh,” Jaskier murmured. He thought maybe he should apologize, but for what he couldn’t be sure. The deeper, incessantly academic part of him wanted desperately to ask _why_. 

“But we just called them apprentices,” Geralt said, that rough, wounded edge slipping away from his voice. “Witchlings would’ve set the wrong tone.”

“Ah, I suppose it would,” Jaskier said, with an airier laugh than he felt. The bits and snatches of past he’d pried from Geralt like pearls from a padlocked oyster hadn’t painted a particularly fun picture of witcher childhood.

Quietly, Geralt fastened off his sewing, laid the newly-repaired spaulder aside. He slid off the wall to settle in the grass next to Jaskier, and took their oilcloth sack of food from the bard’s lap. 

“Can I ask you a question?” Jaskier asked, and then held up a hand at the witcher’s crafty sidelong gaze. “Before you get too clever, yes, I know that is itself a question, but what I’m wondering is, will you answer me? Or hum and avoid.”

“Hmm,” said Geralt, very deliberately. He drew the last, somewhat flattened bread roll from the sack, and set the rest on the ground between them. 

“Does it bring you joy to be so difficult?”

“Yes. Was that your question?” Geralt asked, muffled through almost an entire roll. 

“You’re going to choke,” Jaskier said. Geralt stuffed the rest of the bread in his mouth. “Child. Witchling!”

The witchling elbowed Jaskier in the side, knocking him over with a yelp. “ _Ask your question_ ,” Geralt said through a bready grin. 

Jaskier did not sit up, instead twisting to throw his legs over Geralt’s broad thighs. The grass was cool and pleasant against his neck, which was, without a doubt, burnt. 

“The other day, you apologized to a dead harpy,” Jaskier said, without preamble. “Why?”

Folding his hands over Jaskier’s knees, Geralt considered for a moment. “Heard that, did you?”

“You were two feet away,” Jaskier said. “I’m human, I’m not deaf.”

Geralt took a steady breath, plucked at a stray thread poking out of Jaskier’s pant leg. “Hoped I could just kill the one. It should’ve been unnecessary to down more than that but… I missed. And they died for it.”

“She moved,” Jaskier said. “And anyway, weren’t you paid by the head?”

“Not really the point.” Geralt looked at Jaskier sprawled in the grass, pink-cheeked with sun. “They’re just animals. Not much pleasure in murdering things just trying to live a life.”

“I suppose I’d be upset if I was sitting at home and some huge fucker kicked my door in and shot all my sisters, and then me,” Jaskier said. “Why take the contract at all, then?”

“One dead harpy now saves a lot of death later. Drives the flock back up the mountain, and keeps any more unlucky hunters from getting dropped on their heads,” Geralt explained. 

Jaskier, for once, hummed a small acknowledgment, and was quiet for a time. 

Not that much of a time, as the endless water-wheel of his brain churned up a thought.

“I was mostly kidding, before, but why not simply… retire?” Jaskier said. He lifted up onto his elbows, watching expressions ripple over Geralt’s profile like a stone tossed into a stagnant pond. “Perhaps there are no witchers to train, but you’d make a bloodless killing as a teacher who could withstand the occasional stabbing. The Continent suffers no lack of noble children who require—”

“I’m not going to Cintra,” Geralt said sharply. 

“I wasn’t suggesting Cintra,” replied Jaskier, who had been a hair’s breadth from suggesting Cintra. “That particular noble child is only, what, six? Maybe? Although…”

“I wouldn’t know,” Geralt said stiffly. “And I’m not retiring.”

“Simply a thought,” Jaskier said, lowering himself back to the earth. He stared up through the elm leaves, the blue sky beyond. Distantly he wondered if, a hundred miles south, a little girl looked at these same clouds and felt as though something was missing. 

Geralt smacked Jaskier’s thigh, more noise than anything else. “You can think later. For now, you’ve got drills to do. From another five paces back.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just cut my hand off?” Jaskier sighed. But he was fed, and rested, and marginally less damp with exertion, so he climbed to his feet and went back to the target.

The real complaining began when Geralt made him switch to his left hand.


	3. Alp's Well that Ends Well

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the sleep paralysis demon is not your friend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for some horror and gore at the end, I guess? and sleep paralysis.

**The Seventh Hunt: The Road Back**

Daylight proved friend and foe alike. A few minutes on the road and Jaskier was warm and mostly dry—but the traitorous sun had baked the swamp-smell into his clothes. Probably permanently. It was no longer a maybe: this outfit was going into a fire as soon as they got back to Gors Velen. He only hoped the stink wouldn’t seep into the saddle; this one fit his bony ass quite well. He couldn’t afford to burn it.

Jaskier tossed his hair out of his eyes, and it flopped immediately back. He needed a trim. Hadn’t had one since sometime the previous winter. 

Blowing his fringe out of his face, Jaskier looked to Geralt and asked, “Do you suppose there's a barb… oh. You’re sleeping.”

“I’m not,” Geralt murmured.

“Well, could’ve fooled me.”

The witcher rode with his eyes closed, chin tipped down not quite to his chest. He was an expert horseman, and Roach an expert horse, so Geralt could ride blind. He held the reins loosely in one hand, the other resting on his thigh—and drumming an irregular tattoo. 

“You know there’s no need to be so stoic,” Jaskier said. “You don’t have to sit there and quietly suffer.”

Most of the color, what little of it there was, had come back to Geralt’s skin, but the light still hurt his eyes. When he cracked them open to squint at Jaskier his pupils were huge, dark pools even through slitted lids.

“It’ll pass,” Geralt said. “Soon enough.”

“It could pass _now_ ,” Jaskier retorted. He nudged Thistle sideways, til her flank nearly touched Roach’s. Close enough that he could lean down and shove a hand in Geralt’s saddlebags. 

“What—get out of that. Th’fuck’re you doing?” Geralt pressed his knee into Roach’s side, and she gracefully sidestepped. Jaskier yelped, nearly fell from the saddle, quickly righted himself.

“I know that’s where you keep your white honey, and you clearly need it,” the bard replied. Again he edged his horse towards Geralt’s, who shied away. Shortly they were crowded against the very edge of the road, threatening to fall in the ditch, and Geralt had to resort to smacking Jaskier’s hand away. The bard elbowed him, knocking him sideways, darting for the bag again. What ensued was a flurry of cursing and slapping, until finally Geralt braced his hand against the side of Jaskier’s head and kept him at a stiff-armed length.

“Why are you fighting me!” Jaskier demanded, stretching his arm as far as he could towards the witcher. Geralt, being approximately the size and shape of a siege engine, had the longer reach.

“Because I’m fucking fine, Jaskier,” Geralt grunted, rather out of breath.

“You can’t even keep your eyes open,” Jaskier replied. He steered his horse away, and Geralt’s arm dropped back to his side. “You said it’d wear off by the time we got to the horses, and now it’s been another quarter hour.”

“Lambert brewed that Cat, it was stronger than I’m used to.” Geralt closed his eyes again. “It’ll be through by the time we get to the city. You don’t need to be so concerned with me.”

“Oh, but I do, because _you_ certainly aren’t,” Jaskier said. “Refusing help and denying yourself the things you need isn’t heroic, Geralt, it’s _stupid_.”

It came out very sharp, sharper than he intended. Geralt blinked his squinty eyes at the bard, who blew out a breath and looked away.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m hungry and smelly and my fucking trousers are still wet.”

“Be back at the keep soon enough,” Geralt said. 

At the gates of Gors Velen, Geralt could see, but Jaskier’s mood hadn’t much improved.

* * *

**The Second Hunt**

Elisabeta did not cry. Her lips trembled as she spoke, her wide brown eyes bright with tears, but she did not let them fall. Between sentences she would look down at the child in her lap, a boy maybe a year old, and she would smile, or kiss his chubby cheek. He would laugh and laugh, and then occupy himself playing with the beaded bracelets on her wrist.

Jaskier admired her for it. There’s heroism in these small acts, he thought. In keeping a cheery face for your child who is too small to know the monsters lurking in the woods. In graciously offering tea to two strange men showing up on your doorstep, when you have no proof they could actually help. His tea went cold as he watched her, only half listening to the conversation.

“Have you seen it?” Geralt asked her. He sat very stiffly in a rough-hewn wooden chair, hands folded neatly in his lap. Elisabeta’s grandmother—who had been introduced as simly Grandmother—stood behind her, scowling fiercely at the witcher.

“No,” replied Elisabeta. She was very young, perhaps no more than twenty herself. A baby with a baby. “It comes in the night, and I can’t—it won’t let me move.”

Geralt nodded, and asked very gently, “It holds you down, or are you paralyzed?”

The girl shook her head, thick dark curls brushing across her shoulders. The baby chattered out a string of nonsense words, and she shifted him across her lap as she answered, “Both? I’m not sure. I don’t know if it has hands. It feels like it sits on my chest. Like a weight is pressing me down into the bed and I—I have terrible visions. Myself and my loves dead, my Pavel dying… it’s awful.”

“Before I ask,” Geralt said, leaning forward a little. He steepled his fingers between his spread knees. “Before I ask, I want you to know I believe that something is happening here, alright? This isn’t me doubting you. But I need to know: is there any proof that this… thing, whatever it is, is coming into your home at night? Does it take anything, or leave anything behind?”

“Yes, it… Oh,” Elisabeta said, and her voice wavered terribly. She glanced down at the baby, and bit her lips. Turning, she looked up at her grandmother. "Would you take him, please? Outside?”

Grandmother hesitated. Sharp black eyes darted from Geralt to Jaskier, untrusting, torn between taking the baby and leaving her granddaughter alone with two strange men.

“Let me,” Jaskier said, standing. 

“Witchers steal babies,” said Grandmother, putting a protective hand on Elisabeta’s shoulder. 

“Well lucky for all of us, I’m no witcher,” Jaskier said brightly. “I’ll take him just outside, you can watch me through the window. And I’ll even leave my lute here, I promise I’d never leave without it.”

He slung the lute case off his shoulder, and made a show of setting it next to her chair.

“It’s fine, Grandmother.” Elisabeta lifted the child, whom Jaskier bent to take. 

“Does this little paczki have a name?” he asked, scrunching his face at the baby. 

“Pavel.”

Hefting the baby on one hip, Jaskier smiled softly at the young mother. “Just outside,” he said, with a friendly little nod. Then he turned, and started for the door, saying cheerfully, “Come on, Pavelek, let’s go meet Roach.”

Elisabeta watched them go, waiting for her child’s babbling and Jaskier’s to fade before looking back to Geralt. “You asked if there’s proof,” she said, and sniffed pitifully. “There is. It bites me.”

Geralt nodded somberly. He’d caught the faint scent of blood when the girl had let them in, but with a small child on a farm, that wasn’t unusual. A quick glance proved her neck and arms were intact. “Can you tell me where?”

She began to undo the top button of her shirt, and Grandmother’s hand shot out like a viper to grip Elisabeta’s shirt collar. “Beta,” she hissed.

“Please, Grandmother, how can he help if he doesn’t see?” Elisabeta said. “I trust him. This is the White Wolf, you’ve heard the songs.”

“You can just tell me,” Geralt said, with a quick look at Grandmother. He had no desire to be this woman’s enemy, she looked like she could split logs with a hard stare. “A tooth pattern can be helpful with identification, but it’s not necessary.”

“Really, I don’t mind,” she said, gently brushing her grandmother’s hand away. Unfastening two buttons, she tugged her collar aside just enough to expose the mark. Just below her clavicle, a bite as perfectly round as a lamprey’s maw sat raw and red against her olive skin. He made out the edges of at least two others, a web of bruised rings dotting her chest. 

Half-rising from his chair, Geralt hesitated. Gesturing towards her, he asked, “May I?”

Elisabeta nodded, and Geralt rose to approach under the guise of taking a closer look. The bite itself was relatively unremarkable, he knew a handful of monsters with similar teeth. What he needed was the scent, but asking an already terrified young woman if he could smell her would not earn him any favors. Might just earn him Grandmother’s knitting needles in the eye socket, though.

As he bent down, Geralt slowly, quietly inhaled. He searched for traces of venom, disease, anything a creature may have left on or in the poor girl’s wound. He scented only soap and tea, cow’s milk and baby and just a trace of blood. Nothing unusual. 

That narrowed it considerably. A creature that left no sign of itself, other than horrid bites and visions of untimely death.

While he stood so close, Geralt took a quick look at Elisabeta’s face. Dark circles sat heavy beneath her eyes, weariness pinching her brows together. Her skin was not the healthy, warm brown of her grandmother or her baby, but ashen. This could be the exhaustion of any parent—if not for her heart hammering in her chest like a rabbit’s. Geralt thought even a human could hear it beating.

It wasn’t just biting her. It was drinking her blood, sweetened with her fear.

“This started… two weeks ago?” Geralt said, straightening. He returned to his own chair, perching just at the edge of it. 

Elisabeta nodded, re-fastening her shirt. “Yes. I thought it was a nightmare, the first night. Such awful nightmares, blood and death and loneliness—but a nightmare goes away, yes? Only now it’s every night, and the bites… every morning a new bite.” Finally a tear rolled down her cheek, and Grandmother stroked a gentle hand over Elisabeta’s hair. “Please, master witcher, do you know what it is? Can you help me? Will it—will it hurt Pavel?”

“I have a suspicion,” he said. “Before all this started, the nightmares and the biting. Did anything strange happen on your farm? Missing chickens, smashed eggs, unlocked fences.”

“She lost two calves,” Grandmother said. Her expression had softened from murderous to merely violent. 

Elisabeta shook her head. “We had a cold snap, they froze.”

“They were so thin, Beta. And neither cow has produced since.”

“Grief for their babies.”

Grandmother clicked her tongue. “Tch, cows don’t grieve.”

“Everything grieves,” Geralt murmured. Dead calves and dry cows—he knew what it was. “Do you have somewhere else you can stay tonight?”

“With me, in town,” Grandmother said, immediately. Then, to Elisabeta, “As you should have done when Mikkel was conscripted.”

The girl frowned, a resolute set to her jaw. “And what would happen to the farm? We will need it still when Mikkel returns.”

Grandmother said nothing, but spared a small, knowing glance at the witcher. They were each very old, and had seen many things, and they knew. Conscripted farmers rarely returned.

“He’ll also need a living wife,” Geralt said, with a smile he prayed was reassuring. He pushed to his feet. “Pack what you need to stay the night with your grandmother. I’m going to step out and talk to my companion a minute.”

“Just one night?” Elisabeta asked. She stood, smoothed her hands primly down the front of her dress. “One night, and it’s done?”

“That’s my hope,” Geralt said. “One way or another.”

Outside, he found Jaskier and Pavel had crossed the dirt road. The bard crouched at the far edge of it, the baby balanced on his thigh and grasping at the wildflowers that sprung from the ditch. Geralt stood in the door a moment and listened as Jaskier named each bloom that Pavel touched, making a little rhyme of it.

“Snapdragon, tansy, clover and pansy,” Jaskier sang, bouncing the boy with the beat. “Which of these, which of these, does Pavel fancy?” 

At his own name, Pavel let out the sort of squealing peal of laughter that only babies were capable of. Geralt could hear the grin in Jaskier’s voice as he continued, “Daisy white, and yarrow yellow, Pavel is a jolly fellow!”

It was with some reluctance that Geralt finally crossed the road. 

Jaskier looked up when the witcher’s shadow fell across the flowers, smiling broadly. “Figure it out?” he asked. He shifted Pavel to his shoulder, and stood. 

“Yes. It’s good we arrived when we did,” Geralt said. “Another week and she’d be dead.”

“That’s awful.” The baby burbled, toying with the buttons on Jaskier’s collar. “What is it?”

“An alp,” said Geralt. “It’s a sort of vampire.”

Jaskier’s grip tightened on the child, protective. “Oh fu—" he looked quickly at the top of Pavel’s head, then amended, “Oh dear.”

“Oh fu is more fitting,” Geralt sighed. “Need to take a look at the cows, but I’m certain that’s what we’re dealing with.”

“And what do we need to do to get rid of it?” Jaskier asked. In his arms, Pavel twisted around, reaching chubby hands towards the witcher.

Without much thought, Geralt took the baby. “Figure something out by tonight. Pain in the a… er. Bottom, to catch.”

“You can’t just lie in wait for it to show up?” Jaskier asked. He had to stifle a particularly obnoxious grin at the sight of the stoic White Wolf casually holding a wriggling, giggling baby.

“Alps are tricky. They don’t always—” The chain on his medallion pulled suddenly, as Pavel attempted to shove the silver wolf’s head in his mouth. “You don’t want that,” Geralt said, carefully extricating it from Pavel’s tiny hands. He tucked the medallion into his shirt, and settled the baby on his hip, away from temptation. “They don’t always show up if their victim isn’t there. Once they pick a target, they slowly drink it dry—of blood and fear both.”

“It feeds on _fear_?”

“Well, in a manner. They paralyze sleeping prey, and cause a sense of extreme panic. There’s some debate about how; Lambert swears it’s a primitive sort of magic. I think it’s pheromones, meant to trigger fight-or-flight in their victims—it, er, doesn’t much matter.” He sounded like a textbook, and he knew it, but Jaskier listened raptly, delighted interest in the tilt of his head. As did Pavel, watching Geralt’s face with an infant’s gleeful incomprehension. “Either way,” he continued, “something about adrenaline and cortisol make the blood more potent for the alp.”

“They draw it out,” Jaskier said, with the faraway look of a scholar chewing new information. “Longer periods of fear and anticipation, a higher concentration of hormones in the blood.”

“That’s exactly it, yeah,” Geralt replied, mildly impressed, though he should not have been. Sometimes he forgot that Jaskier was a tenured professor. “They follow a routine, returning to the same spot every night until the victim dies or something changes and scares them off.”

“I assume that you aren’t going to use that poor girl as bait,” Jaskier said, looking pensively at Pavel’s back.

“Of course not,” Geralt said, frowning. “Without her in the bed, though, I just have to hope it gets close enough for me to kill it before it bolts.”

“You sound like you’ve only got one shot,” Jaskier said.

Geralt scrubbed a hand over his face, weary before the hunt even began. “I do. Alps are a tough catch. Cautious. If it scents me, if it can’t find its prey, if I miss, it’ll take off and it won’t come back.”

Cocking his head, Jaskier said, “Isn’t that what we want? Elisabeta won’t have to worry anymore.” 

“It’ll find someone else and kill them instead. Rather stop it here for good.”

“What if there was someone in the bed? At least lure it into the house,” Jaskier asked, tapping his fingers thoughtfully against his chin.

“Too risky. If I lie down, it could paralyze me before I realize it's there,” Geralt said, shaking his head. A fat little baby hand tapped at his chin, which he dutifully ignored. “Once it realizes I’m not Elisabeta, it’ll rabbit before I can stand up.”

“Obviously not you, you’ve got to stab it.” Spreading his hands, grinning broadly, Jaskier said, “Me.”

“Absolutely not,” Geralt said, immediately. “It could kill you.”

“I trust you not to let it do that,” Jaskier said, shrugging. “I know I’m a foot taller, considerably paler, and a dead sight older than Elisabeta, but if I’m lying down, how will it know?”

“They do hunt by smell,” Geralt said slowly, considering. “You wouldn’t have to look like her at all, they can’t see very well.” Then he shook his head again, and scowled ever deeper. “No. I’m not using you as bait. You can wait in town.”

“I have slain a wyvern and punched a harpy, Geralt, I can handle lying in a bed waiting for a vampire,” Jaskier said. 

“Cockiness has killed more witchers than monsters ever could,” Geralt said darkly. Pavel abruptly bounced himself, and Geralt put a steady hand on the baby’s back to keep him from flipping backwards onto the ground. 

“You said yourself that it’s more likely to show up for a victim,” Jaskier said. “So would it not stand to reason that, if you wish to kill it _tonight_ , you need someone hale and healthy sleeping in this house?”

Geralt was silent, which was all the confirmation Jaskier needed. 

“Do you have any better options?”

Still nothing from the witcher. The baby babbled, a long string of _muhmuhmuhmuh_. 

“You think about it, I’ll return Pavel before Grandmother comes out here and skins us for stealing him,” Jaskier said. Pavel went easily back into his arms, and Jaskier returned to the house, adding a final verse to his song as he went. “Violet, poppy, lily, primrose, back to mother Pavel goes!”

Geralt stared down into the wildflowers for a long moment, racking his brain for any better plan than _use Jaskier as vampire bait_. He could ruminate on it, he decided, as he looked around the farm.

It was a modest thing. Three milk cows and an ox in a small pasture, a handful of chickens, a vegetable garden just beginning to sprout. A lean-to of a barn, stacked with hay bales and well-loved tools. He approached the cows carefully, wary of the ox and glad it wasn’t a bull. The witcher had no desire to get kicked in the chest today, and animals were often uneasy in his presence. 

The ox soundly ignored him, loitering at the far end of the pasture. One cow cast him a dubious look, but went back to her cud without incident. A quick once-over turned up just what he expected: two of the cows had faded, circular bites on their udders.

“Easy prey after a long winter,” he muttered to himself. “Kill the calves for enough strength to start on the humans. Must’ve hibernated nearby.”

Clinging to a final shred of optimism, Geralt followed the rough-hewn fence—a corner of which was beginning to collapse—in search of any evidence of the alp’s presence. There was a very small, very unlikely chance it had burrowed somewhere on the property, and he could jam his sword into the ground and call it a day. Elisabeta wouldn’t have to leave at all.

He found only half a vaguely-humanoid footprint beneath the bedroom window, between a pair of gooseberry bushes. Another, in the same direction, at the edge of the trees. The alp must have a den under a hawthorn shrub or a fallen log, somewhere deep in a forest full of hawthorn shrubs and fallen logs. Staring into the woods, hands on his hips, Geralt muttered a resigned, “Ah, fuck.”

Jaskier was right.

Bait was his best option. 

Fuck, fuck, and fuck again.

Geralt circled back to the front of the house, past the crumbling fence and the indifferent ox. Inside, Grandmother stood near the door, Pavel balanced on one bony hip. Elisabeta was handing some small, paper-wrapped item to Jaskier, who graciously folded both of his hands around her outstretched one.

“Thank you, my dear, we’ve been a long time between towns, and I’ve run low,” Jaskier said. “Your kindness is unmatched.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Elisabeta replied, cheerfully. She patted the back of Jaskier’s hand, still holding hers. “My cousin makes it, I have plenty. And if your witcher can slay this—alp? Then this is nothing.”

“No if, love,” Jaskier said. His eyes flicked to Geralt in the door, and he smiled. “ _My_ witcher is a man of his word. You can be sure your farm will be alp-less tomorrow morning.”

Geralt and Jaskier followed Elisabeta and Grandmother as far as the road, where they clustered and made their final farewells. When the women had receded into the distance, vanishing over the far hill towards town, Geralt asked, “What did she give you?”

Jaskier held up the little parcel, smiling smugly. “Soap, same as she uses. How better to lure a vampire that hunts by scent, than by smelling like it’s prey?”

“I never agreed to using you for bait,” Geralt said. 

“I am merely keeping our options open, wolf.” He turned on his heel, whistling all the way back to the house.

At the mouth of the barn, fingers steepled and nervously tapping in front of him, Jaskier leaned to peer around a hay bale. “Geralt?” he called, in that curiously sing-song way he always said it when he was unsure.

The witcher did not reply right away, though there was a fair amount of shuffling and grunting from the rear of the barn. They’d taken a brief lunch, and while Jaskier was still eating—he had always been the slower eater, leisurely savoring while Geralt wolfed his down hand over fist—while Jaskier ate, Geralt gathered all their things. He took the saddle and bags from both horses, all of his own armor, his swords, his ludicrous array of other weaponry, and even, even! Even the lute! He had taken Jaskier’s lute and, laden like a pack mule, he’d carried all of it into the barn.

That had been almost ten minutes past.

“Geralt?” Jaskier called again, drawing out the vowels. _Geeeralt_. 

A terse “ _hang on_ ,” more shuffling, and Geralt reappeared from the dusty depths. Only one sword poked over his shoulder; the silver, with its forward-sweeping crossbar. A now-very-familiar pair of knives hung from one hand, and from the other, a small wooden box. As he passed, Geralt pressed the knives into Jaskier’s chest. The sword and box he left in the shade of the barn awning, and then started for the treeline.

“Target practice, then?” Jaskier said, falling into step just behind the witcher.

“Running target practice,” Geralt replied. 

Tugging one of the blades from its sheath, Jaskier began absently flipping it in one hand. A trick he could finally manage without cutting himself or dropping the knife, after a month of clumsy learning. “Running?” 

“Most times, your target won’t be standing still,” Geralt said. “Neither will you. No way to move the targets today, so—”

“We have to move the _me_ ,” Jaskier sighed. “This sounds difficult.”

“That’s the point.” As they walked along the edge of the forest Geralt worked up a weak igni, two sparking fingers to mark the trunks of several trees. “Takes you a witcher’s age to fall asleep on a normal night. Can’t imagine you’ll go down all that easy knowing there’s a vampire coming to show you your worst fears, and then siphon all the blood out of your body.”

“All… _all_ of it?” Jaskier echoed. He fumbled the knife, quickly re-sheathed it. “I need my blood, Geralt. Preferably inside my body, where it’s useful to _me_.”

“You volunteered for bait,” Geralt said, with a sly backwards smile. He reached out and sketched an X on a trunk with his still-smoldering hand.

Rolling his eyes, Jaskier said, “Oh, you’re just trying to scare me off the option. But—does this mean you’re considering it?”

Heaving a resigned sigh, Geralt replied, “It’s our best option,” and then quickly held out a hand to stifle the bard before he could get too smug. “Don’t get excited. By the end of the day you’ll be so worn out you’ll hopefully sleep through anything interesting that happens overnight.”

“You know, I can think of several better ways to wear myself out,” Jaskier said. “Livelier, much more interesting ways, especially if we have this entire farm to ourselves for the afternoon.”

“Have to stay out of the house as much as possible,” Geralt said, turning back towards the farm. “Don’t want it to smell like anyone strange is around. And, I need to conserve energy.”

“Well,” Jaskier said, “if you’re going to be all sensible about it, I suppose I can’t argue.”

“Believe _that_ when I see it.”

He argued the entire time, but in the end Jaskier settled easily enough into Geralt’s latest training exercise-slash-torture method. The witcher set him first to doing wide laps around the pasture, correcting Jaskier’s gait—his _gait_! How was it possible he couldn’t even run correctly? How does one live thirty-plus years and not know how to use their own feet?—before entrusting him with anything sharp. He’d sweat through shirt and jacket by the time the witcher finally gave him a knife, and both were left draped over the leaning fence. 

In the month since the harpies, Jaskier’s standing aim at a stationary target had improved at a steady clip. Right-handed he could reliably hit from fifteen paces; left-handed, a little over ten. Turning the whole thing sideways proved considerably more difficult. It was an entirely different gesture, hurling his arm to the side rather than straight out. The brief blessing was that Geralt had him practice this motion while standing still, which gave Jaskier’s legs a much-needed break. Very brief—soon enough he was running back and forth parallel to the tree line, clumsily tossing knives at the X-marked trunks. 

The sun hedged across the sky, a long afternoon growing ever longer with the turning seasons. Geralt sat beneath the shady awning of the barn, intermittently meditating and watching Jaskier sprint and whine. 

Jaskier's, bitching Geralt had discovered, was simply how he learned things. Complaining, threatening to give up, and then suddenly—almost _accidentally_ —mastering. This was no different. When the shadow of the treeline stretched from forest to fence, and Jaskier was at least bouncing his knives off the intended trunks rather than into the scrub, Geralt called a halt.

“Thank every god there is,” Jaskier groaned, tottering across the grass on jellified legs. “I thought you’d have me at this til dark.”

“Alp won’t come within a mile of this house with the way you smell,” Geralt replied, wrinkling his nose for emphasis.

“Ah, you mean like someone who spent four hours running around a farm,” Jaskier said. He pushed sweat-slick hair off his forehead, certain the rest of it stuck out like a half-plucked chicken’s feathers. 

Geralt stood with the easy grace of one who’d spent a pleasant afternoon lazing in the grass. “It was two hours, if that. And yes. Should have enough sun left, too.”

A short walk into the woods, following the susurration of running water, Geralt found them a stream. Less hassle than drawing from the well to fill a tub, and they could rinse their clothes of anything the alp might find off-putting: a week’s worth of camp fires, the lingering smell of monster viscera, ink that flecked the cuffs of every shirt Jaskier owned. 

The water was waist deep and cool, so pleasant to Jaskier’s overworked and overheated muscles that he threatened to compose a full hymnal about the virtues of creeks. Geralt flicked water at him and said they were burning daylight. Jaskier was tired enough to simply listen. 

They scrubbed themselves meticulously. Behind ears and under fingernails, as thorough as if they were on their way to meet royalty. Perhaps moreso, given the truly filthy state in which Geralt was known to collect fees from the most noble of clients. It was all a very mechanical business, painstakingly washing and rinsing, until Jaskier turned a dreadfully sly look on Geralt. 

“I believe I shall need your wolf’s nose to tell me,” he said, gliding through the water. Smiling with a wicked innocence, Jaskier tipped his chin up, offering his throat. “Do you suppose I’ll fool an alp?”

Elisabeta’s soap was strong, far stronger than anything Geralt would’ve preferred, but it masked everything else. Even just a foot away, Geralt could tell that if he closed his eyes—and didn’t know what he was looking for—he’d have no idea the bard was there. An alp, nearly blind, wouldn’t know until it was far too late, if it knew at all.

But Geralt did know what he was looking for, and so even beneath the opaque lavender-and-honey of fine soap he could still scent _Jaskier_. Very faintly, too faintly, and he found himself leaning towards it, chasing the familiarity. Slowly, deliberately, Geralt followed the line of shoulder to throat, til he hovered just a hair’s breadth over the pulse point beneath Jaskier’s jaw, the fluttering of a heartbeat he knew as intimately as his own. 

Geralt tilted his head just enough to catch Jaskier’s gaze, watching him through hooded eyes. This was a trap, an obvious one, and Geralt had gladly walked into it. “You’ll fool an alp,” he murmured, lips just brushing the thin skin of Jaskier’s throat.

“But not a witcher?” Jaskier said. Delicately, he teased the back of a knuckle through the line of damp white hair beneath Geralt’s navel. 

“Not this witcher.” Water rippled outwards as Jaskier hand dipped beneath the surface, palm splaying flat against Geralt’s skin. He buried his face in the curve of Jaskier’s neck; wrapped an arm around the bard’s narrow waist and pulled him close. Jaskier’s self-satisfied laugh shuddered through the both of them.

The hand beneath the water grew bolder, cleverer, wringing a low, throaty hum from Geralt’s parted lips. He mouthed at the bard’s tender skin, just shy of using teeth. Jaskier sagged into it, fingers tangling in Geralt’s long hair to hold him close. 

Turning, he tried to duck his head, to find the witcher’s lips and kiss him, but Geralt dodged. Keeping their hips flush, Geralt used his just-slight height advantage to lean away, to look roguishly down his long nose and say, “You want it, you’re going to have to do all the work.”

“Cruel,” Jaskier sighed, dropping his forehead against Geralt’s shoulder. “You’ve run me ragged all afternoon, and now you demand I lie you down and ravish you.”

“Demand?” Geralt said, lowly amused.

“But!” Jaskier straightened abruptly, bracing his palms on Geralt’s chest, urging him back to the stream’s edge. “When have I ever denied such sweetly-spoken requests? Such poetry, from the mouths of witchers— _you do all the work_.”

Laughing in earnest, allowing himself to be led, Geralt said, “Rather be eaten by a vampire because I fell asleep outside your window? Maybe we should get dressed, go back to the farm—”

“You’re incorrigible and I hate you,” Jaskier said. With both hands he gave a gentle shove, a mere tip of the wrists, and Geralt sat gamely back on the grassy shore. Jaskier followed, settling easily between the witcher’s broad thighs, kissing him greedily. He pulled away just long enough to say, thoughtfully, “But not so much that I won’t fuck you.”

“Lucky me,” Geralt hummed. 

Jaskier kissed him again, and laid him back in the warm spring grass, and found little more need for conversation. The witcher made sweet noise enough, well worth doing all the work. 

“What about your armor?” Jaskier asked, pointing at their nearly-dry clothes draped over a low branch. His own green and gold ensemble hung brightly next to Geralt’s standard black, but only shirt and trousers. 

“Hm?” Geralt murmured, half asleep. Still damp from their second round of bathing, they basked like lizards on a flat, sun-warmed stone that jutted into the stream. Geralt turned his head, blinking drowsily up at Jaskier, who leaned back on his hands. “What about it?”

“What good’s a clean shirt if your gambeson smells like sixteen dead nekkers and last week’s stew? Should you have laundered it as well?”

Geralt scrubbed a hand over his face. “You can’t launder armor. It’s all in a back corner of the barn under a tarpaulin. Can’t risk the alp scenting all that silver in the studs.”

“Silver has a smell?” 

“Everything has a smell.” With a soft, huffing groan, Geralt sat up. His hair fell past his shoulders in waves, darkened silver-grey and curling with the wet.

Jaskier reached out, idly twisting a soft, damp lock around his finger. “That’s why you were in the barn so long. Hiding everything.”

“Mostly,” Geralt said, with a lazy one-shouldered shrug. He tipped his head back into Jaskier’s touch. “Was hoping to find some planks. No luck.”

“Planks,” Jaskier echoed. Shifting to the side, he resettled at Geralt’s back. 

A long, low sigh slid from the witcher as Jaskier’s fingers carded through the hair at Geralt’s temples, drawing it back over his shoulders. “Yes, planks,” he murmured. “Fence is falling down.”

His hand caught on a tangle, and Jaskier gently worked at it with nimble fingers. “I was unaware that your contract fee included carpentry.”

“It doesn’t,” Geralt said. “You would’ve done the repair. No wood to shore it up, though, so. Made you run instead.”

“Just as well, probably. Put a hammer in these tender hands of mine and I’m as like to smash my own thumb as a nail,” Jaskier laughed. Again he combed his fingers through the witcher’s long curls, found no other snarls. And then repeated the motion simply because he could, and because Geralt was melting into it. “And it certainly isn’t any part of _my_ fee. I don’t even get paid for these hunts—although, come to think of it, I didn’t hear you negotiate a fee at all. Unless you did so while I was outside with the baby.”

Geralt said nothing. Jaskier’s hands stilled, palms sliding down across the witcher’s shoulder blades. He leaned in til his chest brushed the curve of Geralt’s spine, his face hovered just near the witcher’s ear, and he said, “You _did_ negotiate a fee?”

After a long moment, Geralt said, “We made plenty on the harpies.”

“Geralt.” 

Looking down at the rock, then aside at Jaskier, Geralt said, “Without a witcher she’ll be dead in a week, and she’d never cover another’s up-front cost. We’ll take whatever she offers in the morning. She’s barely more than a child. Her husband was conscripted, her cows went dry, her fence is falling down.”

“Conscripted? I didn’t know there was a war on.”

“There’s always a war on.” He turned, kissed Jaskier quickly. “There’ll be other contracts.” Then he stood, rolled his shoulders, and said, “Be dark soon.”

Jaskier tried to follow suit, and found he could not. While he sat, his legs had given up the spindly ghost, traitorous muscles choosing to deliquesce into uselessness beneath him. Geralt watched in mild amusement as Jaskier groaned and then held out both arms like a child. “You shall have to carry me, wolf. You’ve ruined me. My legs are going to fall off my body.”

“Don’t think it was the running that did you in,” Geralt said, with a soft laugh. Grasping both of Jaskier’s hands, Geralt hauled him to his feet, held him steady by the hips. “You walk everywhere, Jaskier, your legs will be fine.”

Hobbling towards his clothes, Jaskier said, “Exactly, I _walk_. I stroll! I ride my horse. I stop when I am tired. I don’t sprint around like a madman with his ass on fire.”

Geralt followed a step behind, ready on the off-chance Jaskier did actually fall over. They made it to the tree without incident, and Geralt pulled his shirt off the branch. “If it’ll improve your timing, I can set your ass on fire next time.”

“Oh, witcher,” Jaskier sighed, with a lascivious grin. “You already do.”

Geralt rolled his eyes, and said nothing, and hid his smile in the shirt he tugged over his head.

Night came quickly, the last vestiges of swift winter twilights not yet burned away by the encroaching summer. A fat, full moon peeked up over the treeline, casting the house and yard in watery silver light. Jaskier, tired but not yet willing to sleep, reclined in a chair beneath an open window, elbow on the sill, chin in hand.

“Not sure why you had to take my lute, too,” he said. “I could be working on this song cycle.”

A low, absent _hm_ drifted through the window. Geralt sat on a milking stool outside, making his final preparations for the hunt. 

“It’s just hardwood,” Jaskier continued. He leaned aside to peer at the top of the witcher’s head. “This whole house is made of wood—the whole _woods_ is made of wood. Can’t imagine it’d smell that different.”

Geralt swiped an oiled cloth along the length of the sword balanced across his knees, coating the silver blade in a thin, fragrant layer of lavender oil. “Not just the wood,” he said, by way of no explanation at all.

“No?” Jaskier said. 

“No,” Geralt murmured. Lifting the sword, he gave it an experimental sniff. The silver was only just detectable beneath the florals. Sighting down the blade to check for any missed spots, he said, “It smells like you.”

“Me?” Jaskier leaned further out the window, attempting to see Geralt’s face. He’d said, earlier, _everything has a smell_. And: _you’ll fool an alp, but not a witcher—not_ this _witcher._ Curiosity demanded satisfaction. “Wh..what do I smell like?”

The blade whispered back into its scabbard. Geralt turned it in his hands, thumbing over the seam in the leather sheath. Shifting to the side, he looked up into questioning blue eyes, and thought, _like warmth. Flower fields. Shared beds and the first spring breeze and ink on paper—_

“Like bard,” he said, and stood.

Jaskier rolled his eyes, and settled back into his chair. Watched silently as Geralt loosely shouldered his sword, turned, set a little wooden box on the window sill. The only other thing he hadn’t stashed in the barn. Inside, carefully packed in a square of sheepskin, lay an assortment of glass vials: those fabled and much-maligned witcher potions. 

Geralt withdrew two, setting them carefully on the sill. Neither were labeled. The first was a small, round vial full of dark liquid; the second, larger, contained something milky and viscous. 

“So these—ow!” Jaskier yelped when Geralt slapped away his outstretched hand, a hair’s breadth from the smaller vial. 

“Don’t touch that,” Geralt said, stern. 

“Fuck’s sake, that hurt,” Jaskier pouted, shaking out his stung hand. “Could’ve just said—”

“It could kill you.” Shutting the box, Geralt wound it in the cloth he’d used to oil his sword. “Stick this under the bed, or somewhere else out of the way,” he said, handing it through the window. “In case I need anything else out of it.”

Jaskier leaned away, leery. “You just said it could kill me.”

“Just the black blood, and only if you get it on your skin. Everything in here is sealed,” Geralt said. He gave the box a little jiggle. It clinked—rather ominously, to Jaskier’s ear.

He took it anyway, holding it with just his fingertips as far from his fragile human body as he could. Standing, Jaskier asked, “What exactly does one do with _black blood_?”

“Turns my blood into poison for anything that tries to drink it,” Geralt replied, plucking the potions off the windowsill. 

Horrified, Jaskier turned back to the window. “And that doesn’t poison _you_?” 

“It does,” Geralt said. Holding up the second vial, the whitish one, he said, “Unchecked, it’ll kill me too. That’s what this is for. White honey. Neutralizes toxins.”

“Witchers are all fucking insane,” Jaskier muttered, disappearing into the bedroom.

“Yeah, probably,” Geralt said, mostly to himself.

By the time Geralt returned the stool to the barn and circled the house, Jaskier lay prostrate on the bed inside, apparently already unconscious. The window closest to the bed, beneath which Geralt had found the footprint, seemed the alp’s most likely point of entry. There was a second window in the opposite wall, and it was at this one Geralt knelt with his back to the wood. Nestled in the shrubbery planted there, he thought it fortunate that Elisabeta was fond of florals. To the hunter who wished to mask his scent, these flowering gooseberry bushes were a blessing.

These flowering gooseberry bushes were a fucking curse. 

As the night wore on, and nothing happened, Geralt found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. Hovering just at the edge of meditation should have allowed him to narrow his hearing to the room behind him—to pinpoint Jaskier’s sleep-even breathing, his heartbeat, the soft rustling of sheets as he inevitably rolled around like a gangly tumbleweed. 

But every lungful of gooseberry flower skewered him with sense memory. The lavender of Elisabeta’s soap, of the oil that coated his sword, was _just_ enough like lilac to drive him truly to the edge of madness. He closed his eyes, tried to focus—instead recalled the fan of black hair against a pillow, a gleam of violet iris in the winter sun, a laugh that was as sweet as it was mean. 

As was so often the case when he thought of Yennefer, Geralt felt an inexorable, uncomfortable, exquisite pull in his chest. Like a string drawn taut, one that he wished in equal measure to follow and to sever. A confusing _need_ and _not-need_ , made all the more confusing by the still-fresh arc of someone else’s—Jaskier’s—teeth in his shoulder. 

He missed her, and knew it was unfair to do so. Knew also that she must not miss him at all, not with the way he’d left, this last time. Again. 

In fairness, she’d done the leaving, the time before. 

Jaskier’s feet were cold—Jaskier’s _foot_ was cold. Just the one. The left one, stuck out from beneath the sheets for temperature regulation while the rest of his body was cocooned. The perfect sleeping arrangement, until one’s limbs got too cold. Easily enough remedied, though. He simply pulled the foot back into the blankets.

He _tried_ to pull the foot back into the blankets.

He… was not under the blankets at all. Nor could he move his leg, or any part of his body, and it wasn’t the air that made his useless foot cold.

It was a hand.

An icy, dead hand wrapped around his ankle, and joined by a weight settling at the foot of the bed. A second hand settled just above his right knee, so cold it ached against his skin. Higher and higher the frigid-fingered thing crept across the bed, leeching the warmth from every part of Jaskier’s body that it touched. 

Jaskier tried desperately to thrash it away, to kick the monstrous weight from his legs, to lift his leaden arms and shove it to the floor. His traitorous body only lay there, animate as a pile of kindling. He couldn’t breathe; could only manage short, shallow sips of air through his nose. And then barely even that, when it—the thing—the Thing—settled on his belly, cold hands pressing the remaining air from his lungs. 

_A dream_ , he thought wildly, _a nightmare. A trick, like Geralt said—where is Geralt??—Wake up, you fool, you stupid bloody bard, it isn’t real, open your fucking eyes—_

He opened his eyes. 

It was very, very real. 

The thing was hairy and hideous, wholly constructed of elbows and teeth. Most of it squinched up around Jaskier’s hips, long thin legs bent at the bony knees around an ovated body. Longer, thinner arms reached forward, and spindly fingers with too many knuckle joints closed over Jaskier’s shoulders. The body moved, then, with a creeping slime-mold slowness. It hunched upwards, spider-leg arms bending at unconscionable angles to bring its face closer.

If one could call a mouth alone a face. 

A circular, sucking wound of a mouth, lipless, all ringed with needle-teeth as far as one could see into its gullet. There might have been eyes. Sightless, skinned over with cataracts, opaquely reflecting the last of the moonlight—or that could have been more teeth. So many teeth, more teeth than any fifty creatures should have combined.

It leaned very close, and it smelled of nothing at all as it pressed that gaping, seeping face into the curve of Jaskier’s shoulder. Slitted nostrils flared wide, snuffling at his skin, at the edges of his hair, at his earlobe.

Jaskier was reminded, grotesquely, of an over-eager puppy. And even more grotesquely of Geralt—

—Geralt, where—

A scream that wasn’t a scream at all wheezed through him, a high and feeble hiss through locked teeth. It—the Thing, the horrid, scentless Thing—the _alp_ —the alp, the alp, the alp, this was the alp, Elisabeta’s unseen tormentor, Geralt’s quarry—

 _—Geralt_ , where was Geralt, where was the witcher, _where is my witcher—_

The alp, in all its toothed obscenity, reared back and blinked its not-eyes. Fingers like leather insects tapped Jaskier’s chest in an agonizing caricature of a man considering an unwise purchase. 

— _Dead he’s dead he’s dead, he’s dead or he would come, Geralt would come, the White Wolf would never abandon me unless it killed him first, bled him dry, he’s died alone and I wasn’t there I wasn’t there I wasn’t there—_

Hands built with a perplexing number of bones prodded Jaskier’s throat, following the arterial pulse of jugular to his collarbones, to the thready, hammering rabbit-beats of his heart. The mouth opened wider, so much wider, a yawning portal of fang and fleshy tongue, the alp’s whole head was _mouth_ as it bent and fastened its teeth to Jaskier’s chest. 

_You fooled an alp_ , he thought, hysterical, as the flesh was sucked and sandpapered from his clavicle. 

It wasn’t dawn, but close enough. Geralt, in a demoralizing fog of gooseberry, clenched his hands so tight around the sword across his knees the scabbard creaked. Who knew when he’d see her again—if he’d see her again. The only constant in Geralt’s very long life was that everyone eventually slipped away. Through death, through inaction, through simply growing tired. 

Yennefer would grow tired. So, too, would Jaskier, Geralt assumed. And much the better, for the both of them, to live free of the burden. To unchain themselves from the miserable witcher who would inevitably die in a field somewhere, unmourned, as was the witchers’ way. A witcher’s only destiny is death, and loneliness, and blood. Like so many before him—Gweld, and Aubry, and seven in ten boys who died screaming. Those who survived the Trials but never made it to the Path, burned and tortured, ghosts of the hollowed-out ruin of Kaer Morhen.

It was a kindness to flee those who tried to draw near—Jaskier—or those whom he inadvertently and ill-advisedly drew to himself—Yennefer, the Cintran child he did not know and desperately wished to. A kindness to them, and to himself. Save them the inevitable grief of his passing, and himself the inevitable grief of their rejection. 

To save them Renfri's bitter end, butchered by his hand.

A rustling from within the house, the shift of bedsheets. Something like footsteps, slow and steady, sneaking across well-worn floorboards. Just on cue. Jaskier sneaking away under cover of darkness, leaving, as everyone left, as everyone should leave—

Stunted, icy panic trickle-pricked across Geralt’s shoulders, down into his gut. He shook his head, blinked against the violet haze of ardor and memory. Exhaled sharply against the cloying, strangling scent of gooseberry, of lilac, of nectarous lavender and iron blood. 

He lurched forward, eyes stinging, breath catching, fingers closing on dew-damp earth. He had to go, he had to do the leaving, he could not be left again. Get to the horse—

—He was on his feet. He was walking, he was stumbling and choking, heavy-limbed, throat burnt raw on grief and terror— _he’s gone, she’s gone—they always leave, they leave, they won’t come back—_

—He was at the barn, dirt under his nails, sword clutched in hand by the sheath.

“Roach,” Geralt rasped. She was there, tied behind the leaning barn, far from the house where—she just needed to be far from the house— _something was in the house_ —

Horsehair beneath his hands, short and smooth, the arch of a neck. Geralt pressed his forehead to her, to the painfully familiar scent of _horse_. A constant, the one constant—

She bit him.

She _bit_ him, nipped just too hard at his arm, she _fucking bit him_ —she couldn’t bite him, not on that side, not unless her neck was twice as long, to wrap around—

—Not Roach. The other, the grey, Jaskier’s nervous little palfrey ill-suited to monster hunting—Unsaddled. She was unsaddled. She was here, the poor nameless thing, clustered up against Roach’s side, eyes so wide in the darkness Geralt could see the whites.

She was _here_ , and Jaskier was _not_ , because Jaskier was still in the fucking house. Alone. With a vampire.

“Pheromones,” Geralt hissed, clutching at his inert medallion, and never in his life had he been so angry to be correct. Just distracted enough by the gods-damned gooseberries and his own sentimentality that he hadn’t noticed until the fear kicked in.

The potion bottle was in his hand, the stopper between his teeth and spat into the grass and he was swallowing acrid black. It burned through him, sparked along his veins. The lurching nausea of high-grade blood toxicity scorched away the last of the alp-fog, and left in its place grim and furious determination.

The scabbard he also left behind, dropped in the pasture as he sprinted across the yard, leapt the crumbling fence. 

In a crash of wood, a faint shattering of glass, Geralt slammed shoulder-first into the front door, hardly slowed by the collision. Through the bedroom doorway, cast in anemic moonlight, a misshapen lump huddled atop the bed. Still running, Geralt blindly thrust an igni towards the fireplace, and in his fervor every candle and lamp in the house blazed to life in showers of spark and flame.

Jaskier’s vision blurred and stung, only his tear ducts capable of reacting to the hot agony of the alp’s embrace. He could _feel_ the blood leaving his body, siphoned slowly through a thousand needle-pricks in his skin. It wouldn’t kill him, it couldn't, it hadn’t killed Elisabeta over two _weeks._ He needed only to survive minutes—hours—until Geralt came.

And Geralt _would come_.

He would. 

Only death would stop the White Wolf.

He’d nearly given up hope when the room exploded. Light flared in every corner, in the fireplace, churning such sudden heat that the candles on the table went half to liquid. The alp screamed, wrenching back in a splattering arc of blood. Hot droplets splashed across Jaskier’s face, spilled from that gaping jaw. Thin shreds of flesh—Jaskier’s flesh, his own skin caught and fluttering between sharp teeth. It screamed again, a shredding, piercing sound, iron spikes burying in Jaskier’s brain and vibrating his teeth in his jaw. 

Pounding footsteps drawing closer, and then where there had been alp there was silver sword burying deep in the wooden wall. A rageful snarl accompanied the sword, guttural, inhuman—black-nailed fingers wrapped around the hilt of it, and blacker eyes with not a trace of sclera burned above him.

Geralt, or perhaps his vengeful ghost, panting and growling like a beast uncaged. 

“Alive?” Geralt said, in a voice like claws on stone. Jaskier, still paralyzed, could only wheeze. This satisfied the witcher, who looked away, unholy black eyes darting after the escaped alp.

“Huuhhh,” Jaskier wheezed again, as a tangle of joints and scab-colored hair crawled across the ceiling overhead. His eyes darted from the witcher to the alp, wheezes growing more urgent. Geralt said roughly, “Alright, you’ll be alright,” and looked the wrong way.

Jaskier croaked “huuuh _bove_!” as the alp turned its mouth-head all the way around like the worst owl to ever exist. “ _HHHUUHBOVE!_ ”

“Above— _fuck!_ ” Geralt snarled as he was struck by a writhing, screeching heap of falling tendons. He released the sword, left it quivering in the wall as he twisted with the hit and took the alp to the ground.

They rolled across the floor, a confusion of black-veined skin and ruddy-bloody fur, snarling and snapping. Geralt held the sucking mouth away from his face by two greasy fistfuls of hair, scrabbled his heels against the floorboards to escape the whirlpool of too-long limbs clawing at his arms and clothes.

All at once the feeling returned to Jaskier’s body, hot-static pinpricks erupting just beneath his skin. Scrambling backwards, out from beneath the sword, Jaskier pressed into the corner between headboard and wall. He clutched at his blood-slick shirt, sucking in great, heaving sobs of badly needed oxygen. Hacking, wet coughs rattled through Jaskier’s newly sensate chest, and he was going to puke, he was going to vomit up what little dinner he’d had—

A rattling crash jarred him from his nauseated spiral. Geralt and the living knotwork that was the alp had struck a shelf on the far wall, the witcher now atop. Jaskier watched, horrified, as Geralt shoved his own forearm into that nursing barbed-wire mouth, pinning it to the floor by its own craw. Teeth sank deep into Geralt’s pale skin—he so _pale_ , almost blue, almost transparent.

On limbs still stupid with residual sleep paralysis, Jaskier crawled across the mattress, flinging himself at the sword. He clutched the hilt of it, tight as he could with clumsy fingers, and threw his entire weight away from the wall.

The sword splintered free of the wood and sent him reeling. Jaskier caught himself with one hand, half fallen from the bed, weakly tossing the blade to the witcher. It slid across the floor, on momentum more than any strength Jaskier put into the throw.

“Geralt!” he rasped, collapsing onto his elbow and then his shoulder, his body slithering entirely to the floor. 

The sword stopped just shy of Geralt’s reach, and when he leaned to grasp for it the alp took advantage and wriggled free. Fang scraped against flesh as it tore its mouth away, scratching and scrambling for the door.

It was fast, so much faster than a confluence of elbows should have been. Geralt hurled sideways, snatched up the sword, and rolled to his feet in one powerful action, exploding after the escaped monster. Jaskier heaved to hands and knees, trying to chase, enough of that unreasonable terror still clutched within him that he was unwilling to let the witcher out of his sight.

The alp only just made it past the final threshold before it seized up, twisting in on itself like a dying spider. Thin, shimmery wisps of smoke curled into the night air as the alp clawed its feeble way through the grass. A sound like ten cats gagging emanated from somewhere behind its fangs, retching and slobbering thick, ichorous black strings. 

Geralt’s poison blood would finish the job, if he let it. Or the sun, just now pinkening the horizon, would charcoal it. 

He drove his sword through its spine anyway, spurred on roaring anger. Geralt flew at the alp writhing on the ground and buried the blade deep—so deep it pierced the alp and the earth, pinning it like a butterfly to a board. Silver hissed, the alp thrashed, and then all was quiet.

“Is it dead? Is it _dead_?” Jaskier demanded, leaning heavily in the doorway. And then, high and hysterical, “ _Are you dead?_ ”

“Not dead,” Geralt said, words a broken hasp in his throat. His vision began to tunnel, his heartbeat picking up. Gripping the crossbar of his sword, he levered himself to his feet, swaying precariously. 

“You look fucking dead, Geralt, I thought it killed you,” Jaskier stammered, stumbling barefoot into the yard. He reached trembling hands towards the witcher, eyes wide and watery. 

“Not dead,” Geralt repeated, turning. He took a few shambling steps, stopped, looked down at his bitten arm. Oily black blood sluiced to his wrist, thinned by the vampire’s saliva. It sizzled where it dripped into the grass from deadened fingers. “Not dead yet,” he amended, and reached his good hand into the little pouch at his hip.

Broken glass bit into his fingertips. 

“Oh,” he rumbled, frowning. “Shit.” 

Geralt thrust his hand out towards Jaskier, palm smeared with the milky remnants of white honey glistening in the rising sun. “Don’t—don’t touch,” Geralt said. Jaskier halted just out of reach, shivering in his shirt and braies, breath stuttering. His jaw worked on nothing, words failing.

“The box under the bed,” Geralt said, dodging around the quaking bard. His heart kicked up, discordant and human-quick. Stumbling, going to his knees, Geralt pointed towards the open door. “Get it—before the sun—”

Jaskier, silent, turned and sprinted for the house. 

The sky grew lighter, the alp’s twisted husk began to snap and burn in earnest. Geralt’s skin grew hot beneath his shirt, threatening to blister as he hauled himself towards Elisabeta’s house. He made it as far as the front wall, turned to sit propped against it. Above, the wispy clouds had gone to orange. It wouldn’t kill him—he didn’t think—but if the sun crossed the horizon he would sear, and his poisoned blood would work that much faster, and that _would_ kill him. 

Jaskier reappeared, the potion box clutched in white-knuckled hands. Bare feet skidded in the dewy grass as he ran two steps too far before crouching at the witcher’s side.

“You saw,” Geralt said, “What it looked like. White—in round green glass—”

In single-minded panic Jaskier opened the box, squinting through tears at the colorful glass within. Gingerly he picked through it, wincing each time his shaky hands clinked glass on glass.

“Here,” he said, drawing out the shattered vial’s twin. He wrenched the stopper free, held it to Geralt’s cyanotic lips. 

The witcher cupped his clean hand over Jaskier’s, drinking greedily, leaning into the sickly-saccharine taste of white honey. The effect was immediate, his heart slowing, his vision clearing. Jaskier sagged at his side, shoulders curling inward, burying his face briefly in his hands. The empty vial fell to the grass, rolling away.

“Thought you were dead,” Jaskier said, thready. He slipped sideways, pressed his shoulder to Geralt’s, leaned his spine to the wall. “Thought _I_ was dead.”

“Wasn’t gonna let that happen,” Geralt said, rolling his head to the side. A ragged, bleeding bite poked from the collar of Jaskier’s shirt, the fine lined soaked through with red. “This,” Geralt murmured, laying the back of his hand very near the wound. “This is why I didn’t want you here.”

“It’s nothing,” Jaskier said, nonchalance ruined by the tear tracks on his blood-flecked cheeks. He grasped the witcher’s hand in his, threading their fingers together. “I’m fine. We’re fine.”

The sun rose. The alp collapsed into ash, and smoked into nothing. A rooster crowed in the coop.

“Yeah,” Geralt breathed. He squeezed Jaskier’s hand, thumped their twined fingers against his thigh. “We’re fine.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so if you've played the game, you might recall that Witcher 3 alps are just redheaded bruxae with their tiddies out. but historically, alps are hairy little gremlins most likely used as an early explanation for sleep paralysis & apnea. i like that version better, much spookier.
> 
> thanks for reading and commenting! thank you gen & allie for being my random-fact sounding boards.
> 
> follow me [on twitter](https://twitter.com/sheepishwolfy), and i also recently started using [my tumblr](https://sheepishwolfy.tumblr.com) again!


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